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Portuguese has many compound verb tenses, consisting of an auxiliary verb (inflected in any of the above forms) combined with the gerund, participle or infinitive of the principal verb. The basic auxiliary verbs of Portuguese are ter, haver, ser, estar and ir.
Estar is used to form the present continuous form estar + gerund, although some linguists think this is not a genuinely Catalan form, even though it is found on Medieval literature, for example that of Ausiàs March. Another undoubtedly genuine but perhaps too literary form is ser a + infinitive [citation needed].
A typical regular verb has over fifty different forms, expressing up to six different grammatical tenses and three moods. Two forms are peculiar to Portuguese within the Romance languages: The personal infinitive, a non-finite form which does not show tense, but is inflected for person and number.
They use it primarily in an adverbial function, comparably to the Latin ablative use. The same form may be used in an adjectival function and to express progressive aspect meaning. These languages do not use the term present participle. Grammars of these languages written in English may use the form gerund. Italian gerundio: stem form + -ando ...
The gerund in Sardinian changed the final -o in -e (like the Proto-Romance present participle accusative form, estinguished, in Sardinian). However, the French and Catalan suffixes -ant conflate with the accusative of present active participle suffix -āntem , and so the gerund sounds like the present participle, but ever present with "en".
Form Infinitive: ésser or ser: Gerund: sent: Past participle: sigut (sigut, siguda, siguts, sigudes) Indicative jo tu ell / ella (vost ...
The verbs ser (to be) and ir (to go) both exhibit irregularities in the present, imperfect and preterite forms (note that these two verbs have the same preterite fui). Together with ver (to see) and prever (to foresee), they are the only four verbs with irregular imperfect indicative.
Similarly, the participle agrees with the subject when it is used with ser to form the "true" passive voice (e.g. La carta fue escrita ayer 'The letter was written [got written] yesterday.'), and also when it is used with estar to form a "passive of result", or stative passive (as in La carta ya está escrita 'The letter is already written.').